Suchen Christine Lim should receive some kind of special award for this short story collection. Give your book a title like The Man Who Wore His Wife’s Sarong and then subtitle it “Stories of the Unsung, Unsaid and Uncelebrated in Singapore” and you pretty much know you aren’t going to be reading a collection about Teddy Boys in Liverpool or gang members in Compton or life aboard a spaceship traveling to a distant nebula which turns out to take place entirely inside the mind of the author’s pet Basenji. A story with a title “The Man Who Wore His Wife’s Sarong” chosen as the titular story for an entire collection about outsiders in Singapore lets you know what to expect right off the bat.
Compare the title of this collection to such short story collections as Aetherial Worlds or even St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and you can reach with confidence for this book with a certain built-in expectation. Now, admittedly, things begin falling apart once you peruse the other titles in the collection. “The Morning After” is not a title, for instance, that immediately situates what it is going to be about in quite the same dramatic manner as a title about a guy wearing his wife’s sarong. But then you open the book to that title and you read the opening sentence and all is right with the world again:
“There had been a seismic shift the night before. No one noticed it. Singapore the morning after was still the same. The sun rose as usual. Everything looked the same. Except Mother.”
Boom!, right away even only passably astute readers can immediately lock onto the character of Mother as being one of the great unsung, unsaid and uncelebrated figures in Singapore. And that’s another thing: give your collection a subtitle that says the stories take place in Singapore and you really only have to options. They better either all take in Singapore (sincerity) or none of them better take place in Singapore (irony). Guess which option this author pursues? So, you not only know where you are going, but you can trust the sincerity of the author to get you there. She is not out to fool you with a title that promises more outsiders like men who wear their wife’s clothing only to toss curveball and curveball. In other words, the author delivers on the promise.
“Gloria” is a memorable portrait of a mother-in-law approaching the point of madness, or something like it, anyway. “Christmas at Singapore Casket” commences with an entire paragraph quoted from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and then proceeds to tell its own little story of Marley and Scrooge with a notably Singapore sling of twist: Mah-Li and Scrooge. But hey, there’s another little twist going on here because guess what the title of the story that precedes the author’s Christmas carol is? “Christmas Memories of a Chinese Stepfather” and, be honest, how many Christmas stories had you really expected in a collection about Singapore misfits? Almost anyone not familiar with Singapore who says two is lying.
That is what makes this collection worth the read: toss away your expectations with two exceptions. One, these are stories of misfits and two, they are misfits in Singapore. As for any other certainties one may bring to the content, just remember the words of the narrator of the title story:
“All families should have a few skeletons in their cupboard. They make us more interesting, don’t you think so? We Singaporeans are such a staid people.”
Don’t you believe it for a second.
